The dark side of the brick

One of the more enduring themes of recent years in the Lego Star Wars pantheon is the microfighter range.  I have to start out with the view that these aren't my favourite sets - while some of them manage a pretty good design with a relatively limited number of bricks, most of them end up quite cartoonish.  The real problem, in my view, is that the minifig is always placed on a prominent position in a way that is totally out of scale with the rest of the model. That said, I guess cartoonish is what Lego was probably going for, so maybe they've hit their mark.  I suppose these are really aimed at younger builders who probably don't have the aesthetic sensibilities that I do. Least favourite for me are the AT-ATs (and variants) with their clumpy 3x3 dish feet.  At the other end of the spectrum, the dewback and bantha are pretty good, partly because the scale is right.   So, what do you get?  In general you get around 90-100 parts (minimum was 62 with the very...

Tonight I took the wife out for dinner - important to get away from the Lego from time to time! - and hence building was limited. However, I did manage to find time to build up one of the two very limited release sets from last year that I missed and had to purchase from ebay: Yoda's lightsaber . At only 140, mostly fairly common parts, you're really paying for the box and the limited edition printed tile.   Rebrickable has had a large range of lightsaber MOCs over the years so it was only a matter of time before Lego decided to release one of their own.  This is small, totally within keeping of the MOCs and I would have been very happy to get this free.  I'm slightly peeved at the price I had to pay because I was too late to the party on Lego.com.  And I think this is one of those rare sets where I will be putting it straight back in the box and pretenting I never opened it. Yesterday, I started on the last of my big technic sets but I also found a bit of time ...

In case it's not obvious from the near daily posts, I'm on a mission to finish building all my Lego sets, which happens to now include all but about 3 Star Wars themed releases (today, the original Death Star playset and the original UCS snowspeeder both turned up, leaving me just the UCS Tie Advanced, a couple of rare minifigs and the Imperial Inspection to go).  Being a spreadsheet geek (it goes with the job), I've now predicted a finish of 19 June.  There are definitely some risks to this, not least the fact that the wife demands (reasonably) that I spend some weekend time with her but I've already managed to reduce this from the original prediction of 26th by being a bit faster on the building than my predictions allowed for.  So, I'm hopeful of staying on target. Last night I did build one of the polybag magazine gifts ("gifts" is really a bit of a misnomer, as I only buy them for the sets!) but mainly I've been building up one of the bigger techn...

I spent most of this evening sorting out all the odd bricks I've purchased over recent weeks but couldn't resist a quick build.  And, given the AT-AT theme I've got going on at the moment, I thought I'd build the brand new set which arrived today from Lego: the AT-AT vs Tauntaun microfighters ( 75298 ). This is newly released since I last looked on the Lego website and indeed not all the Lego websites have been updated.  The photo which will appear on Rebrickable for Hoth Luke should be mine. So, what do I think?  I'm not a massive fan of the microfighters - I find them a bit cartoonish - but they fill a niche of cheap little sets which appeal to children and are easy to build.  I gave one to an adult friend who was having a bit of a hard time in a care package last year and she loved it, so clearly there's an audience.  However, the amount of page turning you have to do is a bit frustrating as an adult builder - I reckon this uses up about 25% of the build time...